FLUENCY AS A PERVASIVE ELEMENT IN THE MEASUREMENT OF CREATIVITY¹

Abstract

It was suggested that fluency, defined as number of responses, may misleadingly influence both high Intercorrelations sometimes reported among measures of creativity and low correlations sometimes reported between measures of creativity and intelligence. Subjects were 93 Saturday art school students between the ages of 9 and 15 years. Intercorrelations among five “creativity” scores derived from a slightly modified version of Torrance's Figure Completion Test and between these scores and Henmon‐Nelson Intelligence were compared using both raw creativity scores and creativity scores corrected for the effect of fluency. Uncorrected creativity scores intercorrelated high among themselves (mean r= .45) and low with intelligence (mean r= .09), while corrected creativity scores showed low intercorrelations among themselves (mean r= .08) and with intelligence (mean r= .13). These findings are interpreted as confirming the influence of fluency upon high intercorrelations among so‐called measures of creativity and as failing to support the suggestion that fluency may also influence low correlations among creativity and intelligence measures.

Assessing creativity with divergent thinking tasks: Exploring the reliability and validity of new subjective scoring methods.

“…Many variations of uniqueness scoring have been proposed, such as weighting each response by its frequency (Runco, Okuda, & Thurston, 1987), scoring only the first three responses (Clark & Mirels, 1970), or quantifying fluency as the number of non-unique responses (Moran, Milgram, Sawyers, & Fu, 1983). Although worthwhile attempts, these scoring methods have not always performed well psychometrically (Michael & Wright, 1989;Speedie, Asher, & Treffinger, 1971).…”

“…Since the 1970s, researchers have discussed the fluency confound as a problem and have considered ways of handling it (Clark & Mirels, 1970;Dixon, 1979;Hocevar, 1979aHocevar, , 1979bHocevar & Michael, 1979). Many variations of uniqueness scoring have been proposed, such as weighting each response by its frequency (Runco, Okuda, & Thurston, 1987), scoring only the first three responses (Clark & Mirels, 1970), or quantifying fluency as the number of non-unique responses (Moran, Milgram, Sawyers, & Fu, 1983).…”

Estudio Piloto Sobre Una Tarea Para Medir La Creatividad Musical

“…Se tomó la decisión de utilizar una originalidad media para controlar el efecto de confluencia de la variable fluidez de la que se habla en la literatura (Clark & Mirels, 1970;Hocevar & Michael, 1979;Mouciroud & Lubart, 2001;Primi et al, 2013;Runco & Marz, 1992;Silvia, Martin & Nusbaun, 2009). …”

A snapshot of creativity: Evaluating a quick and simple method for assessing divergent thinking

“…The first problem is that uniqueness scores are highly correlated with fluency scores. Researchers pointed this out soon after Wallach and Kogan (1965) published their landmark tasks and scoring methods (e.g., Clark & Mirels, 1970), and later research further demonstrated that uniqueness and fluency are essentially confounded (Hocevar, 1979a, Hocevar, 1979band Hocevar and Michael, 1979. This confounding is apparent even in the field's "gold standard" samples.…”